In The Memory of Butterflies, Peruvian filmmaker Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski takes us on a journey that resists the brutality of Western colonialist savagery and offers us an exquisite, painful and dream-like odyssey that dares us to face the reality of our past.
The inspiration for this documentary film came from an album of photographs used by the Peruvian Amazon Company in the early 20th-century as propaganda for their industrial rubber concerns. Within it, Sadowski found a posed image of two boys called Omarino and Aredomi, (slaves from the Witoto tribe in Putemayo, Colombia) looking directly at the camera. This image was the beginning of a near-ten year journey for the director as she attempted to find out what happened to these boys.
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Sadowski describes how, “their photo calls me, questions me.”. For years she, ”looked for every bit of information about that photograph. Who were Omarino and Aredomi? Did they ever return? Then what happened to them?” Throughout the film it is as if these “ghosts” are speaking directly to her. She began to dig, through international and UK archives, her research spanning over a hundred years of colonial history. As expected, what she found is drenched in the colonial gaze.
In the resulting film we are drawn into the brutal world of the rubber industry through the interventions of Roger Casement, British consul in Peru. Asked by the Foreign Office to investigate reported abuses of indigenous peoples by the Peruvian Amazon Company in the Putamayo region, Casement – heralded in history as a passionate anti-colonialist – decided to use Omarino and Aredomi to publicise their abuses. He took the boys from Peru, bringing them to London and then Ireland.
Denied an interpreter, the pair were shown off to British dignitaries and high ranking clergy, while archives prove that their role was deemed an ‘experiment’. They were still slaves.
This is not a chronological history, and it can’t be. Not just because there is very little information about the subjects and what finally happened to them, but because it is clear from the film’s opening scenes that Sadowski is first and foremost an artist. Through her inspired use of archive footage, seen through the lens of an evocative photographic frame on screen, as well as unusual use of locally recorded atmospheric sound (beautifully crafted by sound artist Félix Blume), we know we are in the hands of someone looking to elevate the story through lyricism and poetry.
Throughout the film, unusual transition markers, like the use of a stamping native foot, whose sound almost sings to us, concentrate our focus as the story shifts from the past to the present and we are led into this dream-like world. Sadowski uses archive footage, some from the Portuguese filmmaker Silvino Santos Documentary Magazine 16 June 2025 alongside her own Super 8 film, charting her journey as she searches not only for answers as to the fate of the two boys, but connects with present day tribes in Puerto Rico, La Chorrera and the Putemayo region, to speculate as to what this story means to them now.
This film is about remembering, but not in the Western sense, which favours a conclusion. Instead, Eastern storytelling values are embedded and the story remains open ended. It feels like what matters is our personal response to the journey of the two boys and the directors’ odyssey, and not a singular conclusion. That remembering is viewed through the lens of other indigenous people from places like Puerto Rico and La Chorrera. Sadowski is careful in her respect for them, handing back to them the memories of Omarino and Aredomi.